First-Time Home Buyers Ready to Boost the Market This Spring

The spring home buying season is right around the corner and strong data from December indicates it will be a healthy period. New residential sales in December 2015 were up just over 10% from November, and existing home sales in January hit their highest annual rate in six months.

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Data from LendingTree (NASDAQ:TREE) provided to FOXBusiness.com shows that the most popular months for mortgage requests are March, April and May. The 2015 national average for a mortgage was $220,499.

And in a new survey from TD Bank (NYSE:TD), close to 20% of first time home buyers are looking to purchase this spring. Two-thirds of those surveyed would also like to put down a down payment of at least 20%. Chris Copley, regional sales manager for TD, says he expects a significant increase in home buying this spring.

Copley notes that while Millennials in the past have faced the down payment barrier to homeownership while paying off student loan debt, they are now at the age where they’re getting married and forming dual income households, and thus more inclined to buy a house.

Kelly Hager, president of the Kelly Hager Group in St. Louis, says that while her agency expects a healthy buying season, slowing new home construction is creating an extremely tight market. “The main message of spring is that we do not have enough inventory” Hager says.